Not a day passes by without my hearing the cries of a street vendor offering to repair things like umbrellas, slippers and even sofas. Indians are, by nature, very thrifty people and have not taken to the 'use and throw' mindset that easily. There are, IMO, two reasons for this: a) India is not that rich a country (probably the understatement of the year); the majority of her citizens has to watch carefully every rupee that they spend and b) India's large population dictates that people are willing to (and in fact, in the absence of other opportunities, forced to) make their living fixing stuff, keeping repair costs sufficiently down (this will not be possible in a country like America, where the cost of repairing a TV would be comparable to that of a new one, owing to high labour costs).

But it is sad to see that some Indians (a good example would be the bozos targeted by the 'lifestyle' purveyors) are losing sight of this virtue and are exercising their new-found economic power with gay abandon, not stopping to think of the wastage of resources and the damage to the environment that they are causing.